How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+1

(Another logistical-technical and slightly complainy post. Probably boring, with apologies to my Dear Readers, as this blog serves as my personal record of project progress and reflections, as well as a place to share them publicly.)

One of the reasons I haven’t caught up on concert write-ups even after the end of my teaching year is that scheduling logistics has been taking up a huge amount of time.

Except for looking into very small towns where I anticipate it might be tricky to find a piano, I no longer do a lot of internet sleuthing and Google map searching to try to find venues. I rarely cold-call anyone anymore. Instead, invitations keep rolling in, and at the current pace of three concerts a month, I have more than a year’s worth of invited concerts to schedule.

About a year ago I decided to stop delegating searching and scheduling to my assistants. The problem was that I was never sufficiently disengaged from the discussion to make the time savings worth the complication in communication. I thought that by using a shared internet calendar, and marking blackout days in advance, it would be fine to have other people making booking decisions.  

But unlike a full-time touring musician, I’m trying to lead a more or less normie life, with a full-time day job, wanting to keep half my weekends free for non-concert activities (and not always able to plan months ahead exactly which weekends will be claimed for special family or other events). I would inevitably find myself back in the conversation soon enough, if not to confirm the place and date, then soon after to talk about finding a local collaborator. Which is also delegable, but it was hard for an intermediary to “feel out” the situation exactly how it would feel to me. Similarly for getting a sense of the piano being proposed—that’s hard for a non-pianist assistant to assess via emails or phone calls, or a quick phone video of someone playing all the keys from bottom to top.

By contrast, interns can assess the energy and enthusiasm of an inviting group—a very important factor in setting up a successful event—about as well as I can. But then there would often be a decision to make, whether to respond with an immediate yes or to politely express that we needed to consider the options in that town before settling on a venue…and again, that would involve a side conversation with me first. Again, it just felt like the time gained for me in not making the initial outreach or search was largely lost to the inefficiency of an added layer of communication.

But the grass is always greener! After spending most of my project time the last few weeks on scheduling and programming, I wonder if I should reconsider delegating more. 

Westford writeup

I posted the Westford writeup on Saturday. It’s my first writeup in over 8 months, and I was already behind before that; there are now 25 completed concerts still awaiting writeups.

The gap doesn’t require a ton of explanation beyond it being hard to keep everything going while doing my day job during the 9-month academic year, This project is a second full-time job (unpaid, just to be clear). But there are some more specific reasons too.

The video editing is a bit fussy, mostly because I’m still a total novice with the software (Apple’s Final Cut).

It’s also challenging for me to choose performance clips I want to upload. My concert playing is getting more professionally consistent, but there’s still a difference between what rocks live in person and something that’s clean and that I can comfortably live with being on the internet indefinitely. (The writeups are archival, so I don’t intend to take down less good performances as my playing evolves.) Something can both rock and be of “recording quality” too, obviously, but it’s common for something to be amazing in concert yet have real glitches that don’t stand up well on recording.

The selection and nice layout of images is also a sticking point. Not to get deep into the webby weeds, but basically html is not inherently well set up to format text and simultaneously manage both vertical and horizontal image layout. However, I have a CS student intern, Lindsay Hall, working with me on upgrading the website this summer, and hopefully she can set up some templates and techniques that will make graphics layout more efficient and elegant.

And all of this, especially the video and image editing, is painstaking, non-ergonomic work for me. And the worst is doing it all while sitting. Besides messing me up physically, both extended screen time and extended butt time make me stupider and less efficient. So I've been meaning to make a good, 2-display, standing setup in my home office. But that requires procuring furniture of the right shape and height, and which in turn requires decluttering and organizing the many piles of sheet music, programs, maps, etc. in the space, and then after that requires finding the right connectors and adapters to get the perfectly usable old monitors etc. lying around to talk to the computer. I’m well along in that sequence, but the reverse domino effect needed to get it all going was like procrastination crack.

And of course, just generally, the longer you let something go, the more daunting it seems and the more re-initiation energy it takes to get back to it.

Anyway it feels good to have popped out a new writeup after so long. And I hope that over the rest of the summer break, as I continue to do about 3 concerts a month but not extra, I’ll be able to implement all the website improvements Lindsay is cooking up and get mostly caught up on the writeups.

I also have a ton of blog posts in mind that I haven’t written, mostly for overarching reason no. 1 (too busy). What I think of as interesting ones, not just about my mundane logistical hassles like this post.